Jonathan Kauffman

Burger Urge's steakhouse burger: Prepare to be filled.

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​With three locations already -- SoMa, Marina, and Castro -- and one expected early next year in Mill Valley, Super Duper is set to burger-fy the Bay Area. We sat down with owner Adriano Paganini to talk about his next moves, possible future locations, and whether or not the menu will be expanding, too.

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John Birdsall

Classic burger ($7) from Doc's of the Bay, a truck hoping to make the leap from Emeryville to San Francisco.

​Zak Silverman cooked at Berkeley's Elmwood Café, did a sort of apprenticeship with Suzanne Schafer and Shari Washburn onboard Ebbet's Good to Go, but it was all preamble, every bit of it. Silverman ― just 25 ― knew he wanted to roll out a truck of his own.

Doc's of the Bay/Facebook

Zak Silverman.

​Two weeks ago he did. After a couple months of occasional appearances at Mission bar Homestead, Doc's on the Bay launched full-time this month, with lunchtime hours at various spots in Emeryville most weekdays. Silverman has his eye on San Francisco ― read about his efforts to secure permits downtown, in the Mission, and in Lower Haight, where some residents are pushing back. When Doc's does make the move from East Bay to west, it'll be the city's first dedicated burger truck. "The Financial District is basically Emeryville on steroids," Silverman says.

Technically, Doc's specializes in American comfort foods, what Silverman calls "straight-up Americana," produced via a sort of collaboration with Doc's cooks Lauren Smith and John Babbott. Credit Silverman's love of Americana for the truck's name, a nod to the marine biologist beardo protagonist of the 1945 novel by John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, an idyll of friendship in a scuffed-up microhood.

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John Birdsall

The steakburger ($12.95) at Lark Creek Steak in the Westfield San Francisco Centre.

​SFoodie's countdown of our 92 favorite things to eat and drink in San Francisco, 2011 edition.

​We're a city of burgers: the homely, the buttery, the embarrassing. And while it's relatively easy to put out a good-tasting burger if you've buried the thing under aioli, bacon, and onion jam, it's hard to do minimal well. To be perfect, each object in a very limited field of elements has to be exactly right.

Lark Creek Steak's steakburger comes close, thanks to scraps. New chef Ismael Macias (longtime sous at another Lark Creek property, One Market) explains that what makes the burger so delicious is that it's a sort of byproduct of Lark Creek Steak's in-house butchery. The kitchen takes all the bits and off-cuts from its Marin Sun Farms rib eyes and New York steaks, Wagyu filets, and other flotsam of prime-meat trim and sends them through the grinder a couple of times. "All the ends, all the bits of fat," Macias says, "all the meats that come in every day."

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Jared Zimmerman/Flickr

Available briefly in 2009, Mission Burger's vegan burger was epicly good.

​Earlier, SFoodie told you where to find the seven best veggie burgers in the Bay Area. But if you're the type whose DNA skews DIY, have a go at making one of the best we've ever tasted ― the dearly departed vegan burger from the deeply mourned Mission Burger. -Ed.

The vegan Mission Burger was a thing of beauty, available for one small window of time in 2009. Many of us look back on it with a fondness normally reserved for dead relatives. Well, no more! I got the recipe from Anthony Myint of Mission Chinese Food/Commonwealth and worked a little magic on it so it's suitable for a home chef's kitchen. Actually, I probably just made it crappier, but what can you do? Oh, you'll need two large saucepans, a medium bowl, and one deep fryer. If you don't have a deep fryer already, 1) I am embarrassed for you, and 2) they're like $30 at Costco or Amazon. Make it happen, cap'n!

Mission Burger Vegan Burgers

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 bunch lacinato kale
1/2 cup edamame, steamed soft
1 sheet toasted nori, minced
4 cups shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and chopped
1/2 cup maitake mushrooms, chopped
1/4 cup scallions, chopped
1/4 cup fennel, chopped
1 cup chickpea flour (Mission Burger used Azure Farms garbanzo flour)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon flax meal
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
1 clove garlic, minced
3 cups water, divided

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Ed U./Yelp

The seriously red, seriously delicious Plant Burger.

​You know what sucks? When you get to a restaurant, all hungry and excited to eat, and upon scanning the menu, you realize your only option is a motherloving Boca burger. Ye gads, the only thing worse is the dreaded GVP (Grilled Vegetable Plate), which is enough to send even the most committed vegan into the arms of a sirloin. I joke, because PUKE, but for reals, us vegetarians want more ― and lately, we're getting it. From the Mission to the Marina and from Marin to Berkeley, the Bay Area is bringing it with the veggie burgers. Also: Want to make your own? Check out our recipe for the deeply mourned Mission Burger vegan burger.

My criteria for a winning veggie burger:

A. Superior mouth feel. Actually, I'm just talking about texture, but I wanted to sound fancy. SUE ME!
B. Heartiness. Does this bitch fill me up?
C. Craveability. Would I kill my own mother for another taste? No, I would never do that, I'm not some sociopath. But, you know, do I want to eat it again and again and again, until I'm inevitably buried in a piano box?

So, please, go forth, you brave veg and veg-curious soldiers, and conquer my entire list of the top seven San Francisco Bay Area veggie burgers. They're in no particular order (that you can decipher) because these burgers are like my children: I (pretend to) love them all equally.

1. The Plant Burger at the Plant Cafe Organic: Pier 3 (at the Embarcadero), 984-1973.
It's huge, it's bright red (from beets, not blood!), and it'll fill you up for days. In addition to the beets, the patty consists of lentils, mushrooms, cashews, and bulgur wheat. LOLZ WHAT? I don't know, but it tastes of delicious. It's a destination dish, with people going out of their way to get to any number of the Plant's inconvenient locations to chow down. The only thing arguably annoying about this burger is that it falls apart easily. It's not a huge deal, because it's fun to find chunks later in your bra. Snack time!

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RN74

RN74's burger promo starts Jan. 17.

​How things change. In late 2009, Michael Mina and Rajat Parr's RN74 was still national-media feature material, after opening in the spring. News leaked of a fabulously recherché burger, available only in RN74's owners' lounge, reserved for the Eloi who owned condos in Millennium Tower, up the elevator shaft from the restaurant. Rich Baumert, then managing director of New York's Millennium Partners, the building's owner, talked about all-access to RN74 and its burger as if it were a perk of ownership, like a free Sunday Times subscription. "It is the hottest restaurant in the city of San Francisco, period," Baumert said. Grub Street tracked down Mina himself, who said bluntly that the condo-less rabble clamoring for chef Jason Berthold's $19 burger would just have to find something else to eat. Grub Street:

"We really have a restaurant concept that we want to keep the way it is," [Mina] told us last night at the Condé Nast Traveler Reader's Choice Awards dinner in New York. "I love the fact that it's a great burger, but we want people to order what the chef there, Jason Berthold, [is] really known for. Honestly, it works out perfectly. Right now our prime beef... we only get enough of it [to make a few burgers]."

Well, it looks like somebody upped the meat order.

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el_en_houston/Flickr

The truck's centerpiece? Brick and Bottle's popular pimento cheeseburger.

​Is the Bay Area in line to get a cheeseburger truck? Across the Golden Gate, chef Scott Howard is contemplating going mobile with the pimento cheeseburger from his three-month-old Brick and Bottle in Corte Madera. Howard tells SFoodie the burger, all gooey with pimento cheese, slaw, and peppers, is the third most popular item on the menu. "It's a version of a burger I grew up with in North Carolina, with a cult following with a lot of folks," says Howard. Revving up a truck devoted to it could happen by next summer.

Give us nine months. We'll get our napkins and bibs ready, and hope a Mission stop is on the cheeseburger truck's itinerary.

John Birdsall

Burger ($10), with fried Petaluma egg ($1) and Manchego cheese ($3).

​Friday, August 20, 2010

ameer n./Yelp

​This is a damn good burger. Kevin Ahajanian, fitted with the Keller halo from time spent at Bouchon, has stacked up something with the bones of Cali quintessential. The meat in B³'s burgers isn't Prather, but Harris Ranch, in patties that wear their beefiness confidently, over a delicate animal muskiness.

Ahajanian has the good sense to lay off the salt, which helps keep the patty tender. At medium rare, it was the juiciest burger we've devoured since the one at Serpentine our colleague Jonathan Kauffman turned us on to. The surrounding infrastructure (Acme bun, good tomatoes, and house-cured pickles, including a semi-opaque wheel of daikon) lets the patty shine. Of course, you can choose to obliterate it under a Dagwood stack of add-ons, Custom Burger-like. We pulled the hammer on a fried egg and Manchego, the former adding a luxurious stickiness via its liquid yolk, the latter a slightly yeasty pungency.

As for the core of B³, the cult wine program that has servers advising diners with the curatorial zeal of counter staff at a cannabis dispensary discussing the psychotropic fine points of Grand Daddy Purple? We'll save that for a visit less charged with burger lust.

B³: 1152 Valencia (at 23rd St.), 401-7258. Open for dinner only.

John Birdsall

Little burger with Tillamook cheddar, caramelized onions, and crispy wedged potatoes ($6).

​Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Maybe all the opening press did Thermidor a disservice. Yeah, the place pays thematic homage to an age accessorized with maxi skirts, frozen daiquiris, and a Craig Claiborne notion of Hamptons posh, but Bruce Binn's menu is hardly a prop for novelty dining.

Yesterday we arrived on the back end of Thermidor's 2 p.m. cutoff for lunch, which launched last week at the six-week-old restaurant. The bar's après-lunch menu offers up oysters, a Caesar, and a mini version of Thermidor's burger. Binn ― silvery and towering, in an Eric Ripert sort of way ― seemed to be stressing whether a couple of Pac Heights ladies at an outside table had liked the food.

If they ordered the burger, they'd have been fools not to.

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